God is _____?

How about undetectable or unfalsifiable?

Handling serpents at the Pentecostal Church of God. (Kentucky) by Russell Lee. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

This article is one of a series of articles introduced by *Flawed Reasons to Believe in God*. If you’re new to the series, you should read the Introduction before (or after) reading the material below.

Theists are fond of using a word to fill in the blank and make them right and you wrong if you disagree with them. They may say God is righteous, omnipotent, omniscient, or supreme. God is _____ and then fill in the blank is a handy apologetic for anything a theist wants to condemn. Of course, if it’s true that God is nonexistent, as certainly seems to be the case, then all such criticisms fail. Things that exist only as concepts, circular squares and married bachelors, qualify as not there.

Here's one blank filler. God is not a snake, except when the deity is Ancient Egypt's Nehebkau and Apep, Mesopotamia's Ningishzida, Australia's Rainbow Serpent, Mesoamerica's Quetzalcoatl, and a dozen others.

If God is in charge of the snake world, he’s either unwilling or unable to back up Jesus's promise in Mark 16:18, “they will pick up snakes with their hands, and if they drink any deadly poison, it will not harm them.” Ten pastors have died due to bites while snake handling since we all dodged the Y2K end-of-the-world hubbub. And I wouldn't suggest testing Jesus's promise that you can safely drink a lethal dose of cyanide. Mark 11:23 says, “For verily I say unto you, That whosoever shall say unto this mountain, Be thou removed, and be thou cast into the sea; and shall not doubt in his heart, but shall believe that those things which he saith shall come to pass; he shall have whatsoever he saith.” The Bible and Qur'an are riddled with promises that are easy to test and fail verification, but Jews, Christians, and Muslims zip right past them, wilfully ignoring the obvious: that their book, far from being the perfect word of God, is riddled with promises that fail the smell test.

Hinduism is the third largest religion in the world. Hindus are equally able to detect undetectable and unfalsifiable gods—they claim to have identified a massive pantheon of them: gods, goddesses, demigods, and demigirges. Like Abrahamic theists, they make their mythological claims without offering any objective proof that any such phantasms exist. Also, like monotheists, they claim to have glimpsed the names, appearances, personalities, and pet peeves of these mythical beings.

Buddhism is the world's fourth largest religion, with some 320 million followers. The religion was founded by Siddhartha Gautama (the Buddha), a 6th- or 5th-century BCE ascetic and teacher in the Indo-Gangetic Plains. The Buddha taught that humans are locked into a cycle of suffering through reincarnations, which can only be ended through meditation and self-denial. Meditation provides measurable, useful results, setting Buddhism apart from other world religions whose main measurable benefits are community and membership in the tribe. But you don't need the woo-woo aspects of Buddhism to get the benefits of meditation, and there is no objective evidence that we reincarnate or that karma exists. It is true, though, that what goes around comes around. Those who routinely treat others poorly reap the whirlwind their behavior provokes: there is nothing supernatural about that. If reincarnation isn't a thing, then a life spent chasing improvements in future incarnations is wasting the one life you know you will have.

This article is one of a series of articles introduced by *Flawed Reasons to Believe in God*. If you’re new to the series, you should read the Introduction before (or after) reading the material above.

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